Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon S4 Pro, a version of the MSM8960 with an Adreno 320 GPU instead of the Adreno 225 that is found in the initial shipping MSM8960, among other unannounced changes. As we found in our first performance look at the MSM8960, the GPU performance is better than previous architectures but not the leap forward we're expecting for this next generation. The Adreno 3xx family should change that.

The Snapdragon S4 Pro should start sampling in 2012, and we may see devices with it in 2012 as well.

14 Comments

To be fair, Krait will ship nearly a year after Tegra 3 started to. Other SoC makers could say in a year they'll be that far ahead of Krait too. But I am excited for Krait phones, that's quite an improvement.

I think some of T3s problems must come from its memory controller, they have four active cores and a GPU on a single channel controller while most dual cores are on dual channel. Reply

I blame nVidia's "design-for-marketing". There is zero to no reason to waste die area for a phone device with quadcore. That area could've been better used either to make the chip cheaper, use towards lower-power cores (which nVidia did get right) or more GPU pipelines.

Now, on a tablet or a Windows 8 laptop running ARM, quad-core may make more sense and hopefully, these manufacturers will stick with putting quad-cores in those and having dual-core variants for smartphones.Reply